Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews.

libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY

ah, I see you met any one of my friends. I'm disappointed in how little this piece steps outside its own snowglobe - the snowglobes it mentions are all impoverished versions visible from a conservative perspective, none of the high quality versions come up. what about the libertarian socialists? what about the pro-choice libertarians? what about the actual leftists? of course liberals support capitalism; the snowglobe for liberalism has become somewhat distorted but maintains most of the shape defined in the writings on classical liberalism. how do you not notice the pro market anti capitalists, the pro government control conservatives, the authoritarians ...

How did you come up with your lists that describe world-views? To me, they look like an exercise of writing down stereotypes about a world-view and not one of deep understanding. I think you would end up with a more useful list if you would write the list as a result of having a huge questionaire instead of writing down stereotypes. 

When it comes to intrinsic values, "values that people consider valuable signals" and "values that people pursue when nobody is looking" are often two different things. 

If you take for example what you wrote about Social Justice Advocates, you might ask yourself: "Why don't they oppose Washington requiring a bachelor's degree for childcare?" If you use a bit of critical race theory, it's not hard to see that in the eyes of critical race theory that policy is about preventing Black people without college degrees to engage in childcare. It's textbook structural racism, where when you can't prevent Black people from doing the childcare directly, you can use a proxy.

If you instead see the position of Social Justice Advocates as "My Black classmates shouldn't be discriminated against and deserve the same outcomes as my White classmates" it's easier to predict actions. It also makes it less mystical that San Fransico with its liberal thought doesn't build enough housing to house all the homeless. 

Loyalty seems to be a pretty big value in the Social Justice Advocate worldview. 

When talking about policy in Wikimedia there was the question "Should a language version of Wikipedia in an African language be run according to the values of the speaker of those languages or should the global community override the values of that local language community when it doesn't like them." 

If you think about all the talk about the evils of colonialism you might think, that the Social Justice Advocate position would be that the speaker of the African language should be able to run their Wikipedia according to their values. But that's not their position because loyalty is a bigger value and they care that those Wikipedias are loyal.

Contrapoints which you list as one of the primes Social Justice Advocates being canceled for associating with a transperson who self-identifies in a way that the trans-community dislikes is another good example of how central the value of loyalty is to the worldview. 

Hello spencerg,

I'll try to outline some of my thoughts below, and maybe that is helpful in some way. To me, it seems that there is a big split between what the text says it is about, and what its intentions are, and I was hoping to get some clarity on that.

What is good?

Where do good and bad come from?

Who deserves the good?

How can you do good or be good?

To me, the relevant pieces to a worldview are, as ChristianKl [LW · GW] puts them, "When it comes to intrinsic values, "values that people consider valuable signals" and "values that people pursue when nobody is looking" are often two different things." Worldviews are about the inner values, what you gravitate towards, how you think and your true motivations for doing things, even when you aren't aware of them yourself. Which is also something you talk more extensively about in your original post.

Which is fine by itself, but it is usually very hard to 'understand' one's own worldview. It is intrinsically linked to so many aspects. I imagine you have a deeper grasp of the differences and frictions between the progressive worldview and those of others already, but I am wondering if you are aware of the tension in this text?

On the one hand, you talk about understanding and truth-seeking, to learn to more accurately see the world. But, on the other, you also write this:

 If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about, or persuade them to do things differently. When people engage with others who have a different worldview, they frequently make the mistake of relying too much on the stories and assumptions of their own worldview. But this is unlikely to work well, because the person they are talking to does not share these assumptions. To be really convincing to one another, you have to be able to see things from their perspective.

Which answers an entirely different question - how you 'should' use this knowledge to help predict, persuade and be convincing. 
I wonder how these two are linked. My thought is that the answer is linked to your own worldview, which you haven't explicitly talked about. 
My best guess to what this text, and original post, is about, is some fleshed out idea on how to make progressive concepts more palatable and readable to a wider audience, and some dos and don'ts with regard to how a progressive should go about 'understanding' other worldviews. In short, a manual for instrumental power and influence with regard to progressive goals. 
Which makes the title very confusing to me. Maybe the text is about something else entirely, but since there seems to be such a split between the written goal and the unwritten, I was hoping you could clear this up for me. As it stands now, the text seems to be skirting around what it truly wants in a way that makes it very confusing to read, and unless confusion is the goal, I was hoping that this feedback could improve its clarity.

Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence